Sound has visibale form and can be directly related to nature. Effectively, all sounds can be translated into visually readable design patterns of organic nature. This forms can be inspiring and thought-povoking and is an entirely new way to look at sound. Evan Grant demonstrates the science and art of cymatics, a process for making soundwaves visible. Useful for analyzing complex sounds (like dolphin calls), it also makes complex and beautiful designs.

Evan Grant works with cymatics, the art of visualizing sound, and is the founder of the arts and technology coll- ective seeper. John Stuart Reid proposes that sound is not actually a wave, as has been thought for centuries, but a “bubble” and that this is what creates the amazing patterns we see captured with cymatics.

In his article, The Physics of Sound, Reid says that sound has previously been thought to travel as a wave be- cause of the graphical, wave-based representation we have used to capture sound visibly in the past… “The graphical representation of sound ‘waves’ in the past is why the term ’sound waves’ is used, causing the false impression that sound travels as a wave.”

…but that cymatics allows us to realize that the true form of sound is actually spherical, or bubble-like, in na- ture: “Sound in air is the transfer of periodic movements between adjacent colliding atoms or molecules. This sonic energy typically expands away from the site of the collisions as a spherical or bubble-shaped emanation.”